Prairie Edge – Conor Kerr

[University of Minnesota Press; 2024]

Meet Grey and Ezzy: cousins, and bison thieves. They’ve just rustled a herd of bison out of a national park and relocated them to an urban park along the Saskatchewan River in downtown Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. It is a symbolic gesture, returning the animals to the land from which they have been so brutally exterminated and dislocated. It’s also a howl of outrage at the injustices of colonialism that generations of Grey and Ezzy’s people have been forced to withstand. “It’s either do something monumental or just fade into an inevitable jail cell,” Grey says to Ezzy.

In Conor Kerr’s deft and percipient novel, Prairie Edge, the word “inevitable” is an emblematic choice. Grey Ginther and her cousin Isidore “Ezzy” Desjarlais are Métis, an Indigenous group that, over the centuries, has endured political marginalization and policies restricting their social practices and land rights. Inevitable, then, Kerr asserts, is the historical trauma embedded in their bodies. Alternating between Grey and Ezzy, he employs an intimate first-person narrative to reveal their motivations to challenge the colonial status quo.

Grey is a wound thinly scabbed over. She has a degree in Native Studies from the University of Alberta that she finds worthless and, unlike many of her peers, has no plans to go on to graduate school. A fiery public speaker, she organizes protests about climate change and land rights but has lately grown jaded over the meager change wrought by such activism. She has a streak of resoluteness: “Once you pull a trigger, you can never take that bullet back, so you’d better make damn sure you know what you’re aiming at and where that bullet can go.” Raised on a ranch in a Métis settlement, she is a studied contrast to Ezzy, a city boy who knows only “the beat-up concrete avenues and alleys of forgotten neighborhoods.”

While Grey propels the narrative forward, Ezzy’s gritty sensitivity holds it together. After a childhood in a string of foster and group homes, Ezzy struggles with alcoholism and ends up in jail for stealing catalytic converters. “All I knew was survival mode,” he says. “If there was food, eat it as quick as possible before someone took it from you. If there were drugs or booze, do them all before someone else could. If there was money, spend it now, or else it’d just be whittled away. Survive. Survive. Survive.” Instead of becoming hardened, Ezzy is often bewildered by the hand he has been dealt. When told that he must own his anger if he wants to move on from the untenable situations he finds himself in, he wonders, “But move on to what? That was always my question.” As much as he wants it, he can’t see himself in a different light.

Grey and Ezzy weave in and out of each other’s orbits until the pivotal adventure with the bison herd. We first encounter Ezzy as he reluctantly steals a pickup truck to assist Grey in her mission. Despite his fear of returning to jail, he is drawn to Grey’s vision of restoring the bison to their ancestral lands, buying into her view that it is a form of reconciliation, the start of returning the land to the Indigenous people. Grey’s “big bison energy” gives Ezzy a newfound sense of purpose, especially as he feels thwarted by forces beyond his control. Their brazen heist binds them in a shared secret and spins them in divergent directions. After the first successful relocation, Ezzy and Grey attempt another, but this one does not go as smoothly. Kerr holds them accountable for their actions and idealism. A violent encounter forces Grey to confront the selfishness that can taint even the noblest intentions, while Ezzy makes a sacrifice that is as heart-wrenching as it is redemptive.

As a member of the Métis Nation and an Edmonton resident, Kerr perhaps brings some personal disillusionment and a bit of pragmatism to the characters’ deed, highlighting what happens when activism does not move the needle in the intended direction. While city officials citing public safety are foiled by protestors and counter-protestors demanding a say in the bison’s fate, Grey and Ezzy become detached observers of the chaos that ensues, mirroring the lack of control they feel over their lives. Watching one scene unfold, Grey notes:

One side was full of university-age students who’d set up barricades and signs that proclaimed BISON RECLAMATION and LAND BACK. On the other side, a group of thirty or so were standing across from the protestors and screaming at them, mainly older white people in their fifties and sixties.

The police mill around as both sides heckle each other. “The racism, homophobia, and bigotry really ramped up. It was like any Canadian internet news article comment section, just spewing hate in every possible form.” The bison meanwhile are “moving back and forth, through the trees and munching on grass. Oblivious to everything around them, content to just hang out where the food was.”

The repercussions of intergenerational trauma cannot help but reverberate in stories about contemporary Indigenous characters. The works of authors like Tommy Orange, Morgan Talty, Louise Erdrich, and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, among others, confront the paradoxes of Native lives struggling to transcend their violent history while tallying the cost of assimilation policies that often did more harm than good. In Kerr’s previous novel, Avenue of Champions, a young Métis man grapples with breaking free from the cycle of disenfranchisement. Here as well, Kerr explores displacement, racism, and the failure of social systems. In Prairie Edge, connection and interdependence to the land loom large. The bison’s habitat loss compromises every other species from grizzlies to coyotes to magpies. The bison, Grey tells Ezzy, “were a natural form of keeping the land healthy.”

Family and community are constant totems of Kerr’s stories, especially the older members who persevere, keeping their heritage alive through rituals and oral histories. In rehab, Ezzy meets Joe, who tries to teach him Métis-style beading while recounting stories of Ezzy’s late grandfather. His Aunt May, despite her struggles, supports Grey and Ezzy in every way she can. Grey herself is raised on stories heard from the Elders on her settlement: “They’d told her of the last days of the Métis bison hunts on the prairies. Before borders, barbed wire, and Mounties took away freedom of movement for us and the bison both, and left the land barren and empty for agriculture.” The border area they speak of is the Medicine Line, the prairie edge that separates Canada from the United States.

Kerr reserves his harshest critique for the protestors who co-opt the cause of the bison with cringe-worthy merchandise and hashtags like #bisonstrong. One such offender is Grey’s old boyfriend Tyler, a charming, attention-seeking rake, a Native guy who makes his brand fighting for Indigenous causes and “specialized in making white liberal settlers not feel guilty about their role in colonization.” Kerr is eager to make many points here, and there are passages where we are clearly being given a lesson—whether it is about usurped land, politics, prejudicial laws, cultural loss and appropriation, or activism.

And what of the bison, unceremoniously carted from place to place? All is not lost. Grey and Ezzy’s anonymous act sparks the beginnings of a movement, one they did not foresee.

Kerr’s prose offers a generous dose of compassion. He understands that contending with communal and individual past trauma is a complex and contradictory journey. Although Grey and Ezzy are “prairie poor” and saddled with an inherited darkness lurking on the edges that threatens to consume them, Kerr imbues them with power. There are ways to make the system work in their favor if they can see their way through. This is Kerr’s optimistic nod to a future “where the herds of bison grew infinite, stretching from dawn to dusk.”

Tania Malik is the author of the novels Hope You Are Satisfied, named one of the best espionage novels of 2023 by CrimeReads, and Three Bargains, which received a Publishers Weekly Starred review and a Booklist Starred review. More at www.taniamalik.com.